Horace Le Blanc

Acquired by the Morgan in 1961 from Colnaghi, London, this sheet was housed with the Italian school as an accomplished but anonymous drawing by a seventeenth-century Bolognese artist. In 2023, Oriane Lavit published an article devoted to the little-known Lyonnaise painter Horace Le Blanc (ca. 1575-1637), connecting this thorough study to an altarpiece by the artist she had recently discovered in a private collection. Lavit noted that Le Blanc and his family resided from ca. 1600 until 1608 in Rome, where he was known as Orazio Bianchi. By 1610 he returned to his native Lyon where he would spend the remainder of his career. The altarpiece to which the present study relates was executed in 1619 and is among the earliest known paintings by Le Blanc, who would become "peintre ordinaire de la ville de Lyon" in 1623. Lavit has identified three drawings by the artist that can be connected to paintings, one of which is only known from an old reproduction. Thus Morgan sheet is a rare surviving preparatory study that documents Le Blanc's manner as a draftsman and contributes to our understanding of drawing in Lyon during the first quarter of the seventeenth century.